Archive for the ‘Floating’ tag

Today I’d like to share an interesting read with you which was written by my colleague Andreas Wilke, who’s a Technical Account Manager at VMware. Please note that the configuration mentioned in the article is currently not officially supported by VMware.

One major benefit of desktop virtualization is the central image management for all desktop clients that can be deployed in many different pools as a View master image for floating or dedicated pools. Inside a floating pool deployment our current recommendation is to use a ThinApp repository for your applications which are streamed over a low latency connection from a network share to the View clients. With that solution you will avoid installing applications to the master image and can use the same master image inside many pools with different set of applications in each pool.

The challenge in that scenario begins with the installation of applications inside the master image itself for applications that can’t be used with ThinApp or are hard to be packaged with it. Usually you don’t want to have the local installed applications inside each pool for each user or it can’t be installed with other applications due to incompatibility reasons.

When you start to install applications inside different master images of your View environment you will start to lose control of the central image management. You will need to install patches inside each master image individually. Inside a growing View environment it will be hard to manage all the additional master images. You have to start using a central image and application management tool for your master images (ex. SCCM).

With VMware Mirage there is one simple way to get back the control of all your master images inside your View environment. The only thing you have to do is to install the Mirage Client inside your master images and add them as CVD (Centralized Virtual Desktop) to an existing or new Mirage environment. Inside your Mirage environment you can create a new Base Image that will be used as a Reference CVD for all your master images. This can easily be done inside the Mirage management console. With this solution you can easily update only one reference machine with patches/installed applications and synchronize the changes to your View master images. The updated View master images can be used to recompose your existing floating pools.

There are two things you need to consider when you want to use this:

You have to disable the Mirage Client deamon each time before you create a new snapshot of the master image so it will not run inside the deployed floating pools.

If you are not using VMware View Persona Management our recommendation is to disable the Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider. This service is necessary for Wanova Mirage, so please active it if you update your master image and disable it before you deploy or recompose the new floating pools

That’s it. A easy integration of VMware Mirage with VMware View and floating pools. If you are already using an application management system for your application you can use it as well to manage your installed applications inside your View Master images and reference machine in combination with VMware Mirage.

A picture tells more than 1000 words…. So here you can see the combination of all products:

What do you think about this configuration? Please feel free to leave your comment.